Over the last few years, communications-based messaging service, such as voice mail and electronic mail, has enjoyed tremendous commercial acceptance to the point of becoming a standard business communications method. The commercial success of messaging service has motivated service providers to offer additional features with such service. These features include spontaneous voice mail, message forwarding, and message broadcasting, to name a few. Of particular significance is the spontaneous voice mail delivery service which prompts a caller to record a message for delivery to a called party who is either unavailable or busy on another call.
The significant technological advances in the communications-based messaging field, however, have not successfully addressed the needs of privacy-conscious messaging service users. Specifically, those users have been reluctant to sacrifice their privacy in order to take advantage of the rich set of features offered by messaging service providers. This is due to the fact that a messaging system, especially a network-based messaging system, almost always requires the sender's coordinates (e.g., sender's address, sender's identification number, etc.) for all but the most basic message service delivery. Unnecessary disclosure of personal information is, of course, anathema to privacy-conscious and/or security-conscious users who do not wish their coordinates to be known to targeted recipients of their messages and much less to secondary recipients to whom such messages may be forwarded.
Message service providers assert that message senders coordinates are needed for a variety of reasons or functions which include billing, ability to notify the sender that a message is undeliverable, not to mention providing the recipient of the message with a sender's return address for the purpose of sending a reply. Yet privacy-conscious messaging service users want the capability of keeping their address undisclosed to selected recipients of their voice mail messages while taking full advantage of the features afforded by modem communications-based messaging systems. In an attempt to find a solution to this problem, some electronic mail (hereinafter referred to as "e-mail") providers have implemented a system that allows a user to obscure his or her identity while sending messages to one or more targeted recipients. Unfortunately, these e-mail messaging systems aim at allowing anonymous senders to conceal their identity from targeted recipients.